Saturday, May 05, 2007

R&B has killed more black men than Hip Hop

Growing up as the youngest child really has turned me into a rather defensive adult - I always make it my business to get my voice heard regardless of the situation or decorum required, probably a reaction to all those years I was drowned out by my older siblings and my parents. Also, I've found myself to have the guiltiest of complexes whenever some sort of mayhem ensues - because as many adults who were once younger children know, if something wound up broken, missing, or on fire - people immediately assumed that you were the probable culprit. I've never been a thief but if a friend of mine happened to lose his wallet, I automatically throw up my hands and say "Hey man, I Ain't got it" - a reflexive response like the muscle memory a boxer displays, automatically knowing to throw that left jab or overhand right whenever his opponent misses with a wild right hook. Whenever a woman that I dated uttered the dreaded words, "HumanityCritic, we really have to talk!!" I immediately felt as if that statement was definitely a precursor to her ripping the beating heart out of my chest - usually I was wrong though, afterwords you could usually find me inappropriately thanking the man who died for our sins that my girlfriend didn't find out about that time I sodomized her sister on New Years Eve.

I think that Hip Hop is a victim of the "Youngest Child Syndrome" as well, inappropriately blamed for everything from increased crime rates, natural disasters, and the reason why this season of "Lost" sucks complete ass. No, its too difficult to look at our shabby educational system where the teachers are underpaid and our kids are graduating High School being functional illiterates - its much easier to point the blame at a few shucking and jiving ass platinum teeth having rappers, who butcher the English language and wouldn't know good poetry if a resurrected Langston Hughes mercilessly butt-fucked them in the middle of library that only carried books filled with iambic pentameter. No, it's too difficult to look at the centuries that our black women have been degraded historically, throughout the existence of television and film, and have been treated as sexual objects from music genre's ranging from blues to polka(OK, maybe not polka) - its much easier to point the blame at Hip Hop, men with the I.Q's of a busy bowel movements calling women "bitches" and "hoes" simply because they are fully aware of one haunting reality - that any vagina owner with an ounce of sense wouldn't come within a square mile of their cock if they didn't have a cliched video playing on MTV and a popular sub-par single on the radio airwaves.

Remember the good old days when some bottom feeder would murder a cop somewhere, or decapitate an arch rival and talk to the head for weeks on end as if he was Tom Hanks in "Castaway" and shit - whenever these ass-hats found themselves in front of a judge, their incompetent public defender would brilliantly blame their behavior on some random Hip Hop album that they had recently purchased? At least there was some comedic value in that nonsense, but nowadays its not so funny - it seems that every kid that gets sucker punched, jumped, or riddled with bullets until they resemble negro Swiss cheese, is blamed on the art-form that was birthed in the Bronx. The students and teachers who lost their lives at Virginia Tech at the hands of that fucking bad writing psycho is a truly sad story, and my prayers go out to the families and loved ones of the victims - but the only thing I could think of, before the identify of the shooter was released that is, was "Please, for Christs sake, don't be a brother!!" It wasn't only because I didn't want to see "one of my own" be responsible for such carnage, it also had to do with me not wanting to be subjected to another silly Oprah-esque town-hall forum, one in which clowns like Stanley Crouch blame two turntables and a microphone for 30 dead bodies.

My thing is, if you want to blame a musical genre for random acts of violence where the end result ranges from swollen eye sockets to autopsy's - you don't have to look any further than Rhythm and Blues. Granted, I feel that most people in this world are blistering idiots - but a part of me feels that the average Hip Hop listener knows that the violent tales oozing out of the mandibles of their favorite rappers is utter horseshit. Gun battles from the likes of Jim Jones is nothing short of laughable based him being soft as a wet pamper, I love M.O.P but I'm certain that the only way that they've ever caught a body was if they happened to be a male cheerleader back in high school - anyone with the ability to breath on their own and finish complete sentences pretty much knows this.

But when it comes to R&B, tales of men attempting to romance women that they know are in committed relationships - that's the type of shit that have sent men the world over to their early demise. Imagine all the premature eternal dirt-naps grown men have taken based on the advice of some jackass R&B singer, taking his words to heart as he spits game to a women while she is with her loving husband - a move possibly leaving the impressionable young man on the business end of a beating, where the married man does that Bruce Lee-style finishing move where he grinds his foot on his defeated opponent. In R Kelly's song "Flirt" he says, "And when shes wit her man lookin at me damn right Ima flirt/ So homie don't bring your girl to me to meet cause Ima flirt" I wish that motherfucker would flirt with my girl with me in attendance, I'd beat him so bad lookers-on would think that he was a negro pinata - anxiously waiting to see if objects like Barbie Dolls and "My first Oven" come flying out of his pedophile ass. Tales of an ex-boyfriend rekindling his long lost love sounds nice on your IPOD, but in real life that long lost love currently has a boyfriend - romantic intentions being met with a barrage of body blows, and the current boyfriend sporadically changing gears from "Drive" to "Reverse" while flattening that motherfucker like a pancake with his automobile. Hip Hop won't get you killed, R&B will.

Come to think about it, some Hip Hop will get your ass killed as well - I just remembered that Positive K "I Got a Man" bullshit.

8 comments:

Point well taken. Tryna flirt with a woman while her man is present is definitely dangerous. My grandfather said there are two things that dont live long: dogs that chase moving cars and men that case taken woman. Maybe R&B should ocme with advisory stickers.

I agree that R&B will get you killed. Beyonce and "Irreplacable" is gonna get a lotta young girls beat the hell down. Mike Britt said it best "You must not know about me, I'm about to catch a case in a minute."

I love that you take a different route. I don't have a "favorite artist" or even a "favorite color". But R&B is definitely my preferred genre of music since I was a youngin. At times the passion and soul is just what I need. But I'm a woman who knows what's real and sometimes I just can't take it.